Developer(s) David Carpenter Type Desktop search | Operating system License Freeware (Expat) | |
 | ||
Stable release 1.3.4.686 / August 6, 2014; 2 years ago (2014-08-06) Preview release 1.4.1.809b / November 21, 2016; 3 months ago (2016-11-21) | ||
Everything is a desktop search utility for Windows that can rapidly find files and folders by name on an NTFS volume. On October 30, 2009, Everything was ranked #857 among 1,757 computer programs used by the 70,000 users of Wakoopa, making it more widely used than WinZip. Since January 2013, Everything has been actively developed after a four year break. This utility is released under a free software license that allows modification and commercial redistribution, requiring only attribution.
Contents
How it works
When Everything first runs, it creates an index of the names of every file and folder on the volume from file metadata in the NTFS Master File Table. By default, all mounted NTFS volumes are indexed. Once created, the index is continually updated by the application from the NTFS change journal. Everything searches this index for file names matching a user search expression, which may be a fragment of the target file name or a regular expression, displaying intermediate results as the search term is entered.
Because Everything doesn't index content and relies on the NTFS change journal to filter file updates, the only file system activity it requires is updating its index, and it uses very little memory and processor time to provide its service. However, because it relies on the change journal, Everything can only search NTFS volumes. It can't be used to find files on a FAT file system volume, which includes most USB drives, or, when run in Wine, on a NTFS volume mounted by Linux.
Multiuser security
Useful as it is, Everything is not a safe application in a multiuser environment. Because it requires access to the NTFS change journal, Everything must run with administrator privileges, either in a privileged user account or as a Windows service. As a Windows service it can expose search functionality to accounts without administrator privileges. However, Everything doesn't filter search results by client privileges before displaying them, so that every user can see every file on a volume, just as if they were using Everything in an administrator account themselves. Furthermore, a user can double-click a file name in the Everything results list to open the file or run it, if it is an executable, and Everything will launch the file with its own administrator credentials rather than with the user's own credentials. Although there may be a way to prevent privilege escalation when opening a file, there is no obvious remedy to prevent one user from listing the private files in another user's account.
Development status
Development was on a hiatus for three years, between November 2009, when the last stable version was released, and January 2013, causing concern and disappointment among users. On January 5, 2013, a new beta version was released.